Obama came out of his NATO meeting today with an announcement that the 33,000 "surge" troops he sent to Afghanistan in 2009 would all be home within 15 months, with 10,000 of them leaving by the end of this year.

This is good news, but not good enough, since 70,000 American troops will still be over there after this drawdown is finished. The plan now is to leave them in for a couple more years, and it'll take at least a couple more really big demonstrations to get that revised.

Update: Under a headline reading "NATO Talks a Sham: War in Afghanistan Is Not Ending," Rep Dennis Kucinich responds to the NATO summit and Obama's announcement as follows:

"Today, NATO leaders are meeting in Chicago to discuss the future of Afghanistan. The talks are being billed as discussions of plans to end the war. The war in Afghanistan is not ending. These talks are simply about financing the next phase of the war.

"The Strategic Partnership Agreement between the U.S. and Afghanistan commits us to the country for at least another decade, despite public support for the war being at an all-time low. The United States will pay for half of the estimated $4.1 billion per year cost of supporting 352,000 Afghan army and police officers. Afghanistan's contribution will be $500,000. The rest will be financed by our 'NATO partners.' It is not surprising that support for the war among NATO members is waning, with France threatening to pull out its troops by the end of this year."

Unending imperial warfare is the dream of the military-industrial complex. It is what we deserve when we allow our representatives to vote for $650 billion/year for unnecessary and unwanted wars which exist only to enrich multinational warprofiteering corporations.

The last link is a blog but filled with "official" links and other reports on Afghanistan's vast untapped mineral resources.

Untapped being the operative word here. Not to mention the proposed pipelines that the Taliban have continually monkeywrenched. You seriously do not think we would committ so many "national security" dollars for a dry gulch? I mean who do you think our congress is workingfor representing?

Ashton Carter, Obama’s nominee for secretary of Defense, oversaw development of the $1.5 trillion F-35 fighter jet, the most expensive weapon system in history. Extravagant funding for the F-35 has not precluded setbacks: in June of 2014, the air force suspended F-35 flight operations when a fire broke out on one of the jets during an attempted takeoff.

Carter, who is undergoing Senate confirmation hearings, also oversaw production of $50 billion worth of MRAP armored vehicles – thousands of which were scrapped shortly thereafter. Documents provided to RSN by the Pentagon’s Defense Logistics Agency reveal that the U.S. government scrapped 2,417 MRAPs between 2008 and 2014. This represented a loss of over $2 billion worth of equipment, assuming an MRAP’s average cost of $1 million.http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/28488-focus-ashton-carters-history-of-wasteful-military-spending